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Anne Zieger is a healthcare journalist who has written about the industry for 30 years. Her work has appeared in all of the leading healthcare industry publications, and she's served as editor in chief of several healthcare B2B sites.

A new study has concluded that while mobile health app developers are developing better privacy practices, these developers vary widely in how they share those policies with consumers. The research, part of a program launched in 2011 by the Future of Privacy Forum, concludes that while mHealth app makers have improved their practices, too many are still not as clear as they could be with users as to how they handle private health information.

This year’s FPF Mobile App Study notes that mHealth players are working to make privacy policies available to users before purchase or download, by posting links on the app listing page. It probably has helped that the two major mobile health app distribution sites require apps that collect personal info to have a privacy policy in place, but consumer and government pressure has played a role as well, the report said. According to FPF researchers, mHealth app makers are beginning to explain how personal data is collected, used and shared, a step privacy advocates see as the bare minimum standard.

Researchers found that this year, 76% of top overall apps on the iOS App Store and Google Play had a privacy policy, up from 68% noted in the previous iteration of the study. In contrast, only 61% of health and fitness apps surveyed this year included a link to their privacy policies in their app store listing, 10% less than among top apps cutting across all categories. “Given that some health and fitness apps can access sensitive, physiological data collected by sensors on a mobile phone, wearable, or other device, their below-average performance is both unexpected and troubling,” the report noted.

This disquieting lack of thorough privacy protections extended even to apps collecting some of the most intimate data, the FPF report pointed out. In particular, a subset of mHealth developers aren’t doing anything much to make their policies accessible.

For example, researchers found that while 80% of apps helping women track periods and fertility across Google Play and the iOS App Store had privacy policies, just 63% of the apps had posted links to these policies. In another niche, sleep tracking apps, only 66% of even had a privacy policy in place, and just 54% of these apps linked back to the policy on their store page. (FPF terms this level of performance “dismal,” and it’s hard to disagree.)

Underlying this analysis is the unfortunate truth that there’s still no gold standard for mHealth privacy policies. This may be due more to the complexity of the still-maturing mobile health ecosystem than resistance to creating robust policies, certainly. But either way, this issue won’t go away on its own, so mHealth app developers will need to give their privacy strategy more thought.

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